From Three Way, we skinned up to the top of Joe's Badass Shoulder which is a fun line in the F'k'n Fine Forest off of a little knob just to the east of Three Way Peak. Being cautious of wind affect, Dan cut the top of the slope, and we had a small bit of propagation that we didn't like. We chose to enter a bit east of where we did the cut, which was lower angle and softer. This skied well.

Up next was skiing the Gunbarrel which is off of Gunbarrel peak just east again of our previous run. We zipped up this, and it skied quite well again. Our next run was Dog Leg chute off of Dog Legged Peak. Gaining the peak here was the second spot where we saw a lot of people, and for a brief period things felt a bit tense. However, we decided to break the silence with a friendly, "Hey! How's it going!" This seemed to break any awkwardness and while it did slow us down a bit, we made the most of it by chatting with the groups among us. Luckily for us, both groups said they weren't actually skiing Dog Leg, so we quickly transitioned at the top and made our way to the entrance. The entrance to Dog Leg is skier's right off of the summit, and not entirely obvious, so it took a bit of scouting. The couloir had been skied before us by what looked like a couple of parties, but the snow was still deep in the couloir, and we were able to ski nice snow all the way down.

About an hour and a half later, we were standing on the top of Bullion, staring down our next line - Carnival Chutes. We discussed our options. One was to ski the Carnival line, which would descend all the way to the drainage at 5,500ft. Our second option was to deviate from Kyle's route and just try to get to the top of Platinum before sunset and weather rolled in. It had been windy all day, but we knew that the wind was only growing through the night and that precipitation was rolling in at night as well. We opted to give ourselves the best shot we could at completing a traverse, and skied the NE face of Bullion down to the lake, and from there started working our way up Platinum.

By this time, the wind was blowing pretty hard, with strong gusts, and to make matters worse, the skintrack had been blown and skied over in a way that made it really hard to skin. We had 20 minutes until the sun set, as I called up to Dan to stop for a second so we could chat. We had about 700 feet to go to finish off our day. We felt so close! But something just wasn't quite sitting well.

Often in the mountains, there isn't one big "red light" telling you to go home. Sometimes there is, and that can be convenient, as it gives you confidence in your decisions. However a lot of accidents happen when little things add up. I wanted to pull our team aside and give the space to consider all of these little factors. The most obvious one was darkness. "Last light" was at 5:15, however when a storm is rolling in, and there's no moonlight, how "light" really is last light... We both had headlamps, but it adds a factor that needs to be considered. We also were travelling on a different slope than we really had been all day, and we were seeing effects that we hadn't seen on other slopes. Primarily this was shown with a lot of "wind skin" breaking off as we travelled. Nothing was propagating, however it still is a piece of the puzzle. Another factor was that the winds were blowing hard, as they had been slowly growing all day. "How fast does a wind slab build?" I asked out loud to Dan, mostly for us to ponder, I knew we both didn't have the answer. The last factor that I brought up was that we had been pushing hard all day, and we both were tired, and that leaves potential for injury. Dan had worked around a 50 hour work week, and we had only gotten 4 hours of sleep the night before. Decision fatigue was definitely setting in, as we had to be thoughtful about our path of travel all day.